Explore the Lunar Surface with MoonZoo

Alun Digital Academia, Science 1 Comment , ,

The Zoon­i­verse, the people behind Galaxy­Zoo has released its latest pro­ject, Moon­Zoo. They’re ask­ing the pub­lic to help them map craters on the sur­face of the Moon using new images from the Lunar Recon­nais­sance Orbiter. The inter­face is simple and nifty as they show below.

I liked the idea of Galaxy­Zoo. It’s pro­duced sev­eral papers already so it’s clearly a pro­duct­ive tool as well as a great way for the pub­lic to get involved. The real­ity was slightly dif­fer­ent for me as I was never sure I was doing it right. That shouldn’t be a prob­lem, the sig­nal comes from many people check­ing the same pho­tos rather than just one per­son. Still, when I saw an example photo of a spiral galaxy, and I couldn’t see the spiral, I decided I was prob­ably con­trib­ut­ing more noise than sig­nal. What I like about Moon­Zoo is the guide at the bot­tom show­ing what the light­ing does to the image. I can see images where I’ve no idea if the things I’m look­ing at are craters or hills. The guide at the bot­tom resolves that prob­lem and then tar­get­ting craters becomes simple. My res­ults won’t be per­fect, I’ve not got an eye for boulders, but I can see how even by pos­i­tion­ing crater mark­ers I can help con­trib­ute to the accur­acy of the project.

It’s not some­thing I’d want to do for hours on end, but as a way to clear the mind in a few minutes or wind down at the end of the day it’s fun and it helps someone else.

Monkey business on Mars reveals something nifty

Alun Politics, Science No Comments , , ,

I went to Skep­tics in the Pub last week at Not­ting­ham to hear a talk by Doug Ellison on the explor­a­tion of Mars. One of the sub­jects that came up was the Gor­illa. The Sun recently repor­ted that a Mars rover had found evid­ence of a Sil­ver­back gor­illa while ram­bling across the dusty and arid plains of Mars. ‘Enthu­si­ast Nigel Cooper — who has stud­ied thou­sands of pho­tos taken by Nasa rovers and pos­ted online — said: “It’s def­in­itely a creature of some sort.“‘

I’m rub­bish at debunk­ing this kind of thing. Basic­ally I get as far as a lack of bana­nas and rain forest before yawn­ing. If someone ser­i­ously thinks that the gov­ern­ments of the world are con­spir­ing to hide the exist­ence of a lone, and pre­sum­ably very hungry, gor­illa then they have more urgent prob­lems than a lack of basic bio­logy or geo­logy. What is it that makes a global con­spir­acy to hide evid­ence of an advanced civil­isa­tion on Mars, with pyr­am­ids, faces and anom­al­ous gor­il­las plaus­ible? Unam­bigu­ous evid­ence of life on Mars would be a key to the vaults of any gov­ern­ment with a space pro­gramme, so why would sci­ent­ists hide that? You’re not going to answer that ques­tion by con­firm­ing that what we have is a rock. Still, that’s what Doug Ellison did with the video below. What makes it worth watch­ing isn’t the con­clu­sion but how he got there.

The tool he used in the video is the Mid­night Mars Browser, which you can down­load on Win­dows or Mac for free. I didn’t know about this. It’s a tool that takes the pho­tos from Spirit and Oppor­tun­ity and dis­plays them as vir­tual pan­or­a­mas. You can fol­low in the tracks of your favour­ite rover. The gor­illa might be dull, it’s a rock, but the tool for examin­ing it looks bril­liant. This is why the talk was so com­pel­ling. There’s masses of inform­a­tion about Mars you can access. You can even fol­low the (delayed) blog of a Mars rover driver at Mars and Me if you want the back­seat driver experience.

It’s an example of debunk­ing done well. I doubt that he’ll have con­ver­ted any die-hards, because simply examin­ing the evid­ence isn’t going to address their under­ly­ing prob­lems. For every­one else he’s not only shown that it’s a not a gor­illa, he’s also shown the way to more inter­est­ing places that can take our under­stand­ing of Mars fur­ther. The rest of the talk showed sim­ilar insights into the equip­ment on Mars and how you can use the data com­ing from there. As for the rest of the solar sys­tem, he runs a forum where you can find out more at unmannedspaceflight.com.

Happy Birthday Ariane

Alun Science, The Past No Comments , , ,

I missed this, the ESA put out the video on their You­Tube chan­nel before Christ­mas, but if I keep quiet about that maybe no one will notice. Ariane is now 30 years old.

ESA cel­eb­rates 30 years of Ariane.

The first Ariane launched from Kourou in French Guiana on Christ­mas Eve 1979. The Kourou site sounds like a con­veni­ent a trop­ical jungle remote from ESA headquar­ters. How­ever, as Alice Gor­man has found, not every­one finds it exot­ic­ally dis­tant.

Ariane could also be con­sidered an Amer­ican suc­cess story too. The reason the French and Ger­mans needed to build it was that Richard Nixon pre­ven­ted the com­mer­cial use of European satel­lites launched on US Delta rock­ets. That forced Europe into build­ing its own inde­pend­ent rocket which now it one of the most com­mer­cially suc­cess­ful launch­ers. You can read more about Ariane on Jonathan Amos’s blog Space­man, which I’ve just dis­covered, or more about Kourou on Alice Gorman’s blog Space Age Archae­ology.

Does British investment in astronauts match the nation’s ambition?

Alun Politics, Science No Comments , , , ,

MoneyWhatMoney
The Brit­ish invest­ment in ESA’s astro­naut pro­gramme. Photo (cc) Stu­art Pil­brow.

Becom­ing an astro­naut is the pin­nacle of achieve­ment for any­one involved in space sci­ence and technology.

So, after the selec­tion of Major Time Peake as the UK’s new ESA astro­naut, how ser­i­ous are the gov­ern­ment of reach­ing the pin­nacle of acheive­ment? “No addi­tional funds would be made avail­able to help pay for the costs of Major Peake’s train­ing, Sci­ence Min­is­ter Lord Drayson said.” While the UK’s Depart­ment of Innov­a­tion, Uni­ver­sit­ies and Skills is happy to asso­ci­ate them­selves with Tim Peake’s suc­cess and say they’re invest­ing in our future, the Brit­ish invest­ment in astro­naut­ics will cur­rently remain €0.
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Curry Night and Space Heritage

Alun Life, Science, The Past 2 Comments , , , ,

Excavation of a Monolith at Clavius Base
Excav­a­tion of a Mono­lith at Tycho

Britblog Round UpAnother advant­age of being in Leicester is that you don’t know who is going to drop in. On Fri­day it was John Camp­bell from JCU Cairns. He’s been work­ing with Alice Gor­man on the Space Her­it­age prob­lem since WAC 5. Per­haps the biggest prob­lem is get­ting people to recog­nise there’s a space her­it­age prob­lem.

He’s a nice guy, if a little intim­id­at­ing as he seems at home talk­ing about any sub­ject. Con­ver­sa­tion skipped from extremo­philes to the last gla­ci­ation and hunter / gatherer strategies. Along the way we talked about Mir.

Ima­gine we could find the spot where Colum­bus first stepped onto His­pa­ni­ola, or where the Vik­ings first landed in the new world. Now ima­gine it was decided to des­troy. Say, the beach was to be scooped out and made into a har­bour for yup­pies. Would this be a prob­lem? Mir, John says, is a sim­ilar place. It was the first suc­cess­ful long-term space sta­tion. It wasn’t just used by the USSR, it also hos­ted Amer­ic­ans and peoples from other nations. It was the place where ser­i­ous inter­na­tional coöper­a­tion in space began. And it doesn’t exist any­more because it was crashed into the Pacific, some­where between New Zea­l­and and South Amer­ica. A his­toric place has been des­troyed more effect­ively than the Taliban des­troyed the Buddhas of Bam­iyan.

The Rus­si­ans did recog­nise the import­ance of the sta­tion and did appeal for help to boost it to a higher orbit to pre­serve the site, but no-one else was inter­ested. Without the funds from a safety point of view crash-landing was the only feas­ible option.

John also poin­ted out that Tran­quil­ity Base meets more or less every cri­terion of being a world her­it­age site, except for being on this world. His opin­ion is that the foot­prints there are equal in import­ance to the foot­prints at Laetoli.

It’s inter­est­ing that in this case the future has arrived. 2001 might not have bought robots in every home, or cheap space­flight to moon bases. How­ever, extra-terrestrial archae­ology is an issue.

The cultural landscape of interplanetary space

Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

History Carnival ButtonI’ve been sent this art­icle writ­ten by Alice Gor­man in February’s edi­tion of the Journal of Social Archae­ology after find­ing it men­tioned on Raw Har­vest. As will become appar­ent below, I know very little about Aus­tralia des­pite work­ing with some Aus­tralian archae­olo­gists. I remem­ber while dig­ging in Lux­em­bourg Mat­thew, an Aus­tralian archae­olo­gist on hol­i­day, was explain­ing the rolling her­it­age act which pro­tec­ted any­thing older than fifty years in Aus­tralia. This caused amuse­ment when we worked out that in a few years archae­olo­gists would be attempt­ing to recon­struct early Elvis records, pos­sibly even exper­i­ment­ing with white jump suits as they dug. We couldn’t see the point of excav­at­ing a build­ing when you could walk down to the coun­cil offices and pick up the plans. Space Archae­ology should be an even big­ger gold­mine of knee-jerk put-downs. Why bother study­ing the Sat­urn V rock­ets when you can just go down to Cape Canaveral and pick up the plans?

Since then my atti­tudes to the dif­fer­ences between his­tory and archae­ology have changed. Archae­ology isn’t just about writ­ing his­tory without using texts. Archae­olo­gists often ask dif­fer­ent ques­tions of the past to His­tor­i­ans. Dr Gorman’s paper is an excel­lent example of the value of con­tem­por­ary archae­ology.
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